This lab demonstrates how to build a highly available distributed database by using a PolarDB-X cluster with Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS). In the lab, you will simulate a node failure by killing a pod to test the automatic recovery of PolarDB-X. PolarDB-X is a cloud-native distributed database that allows storage of massive amounts of data and high-concurrency, complex queries. With a shared-nothing architecture that separates storage from compute, the enterprise-lev